Lapvona
By Ottessa Moshfegh
‘I feel stupid when I pray -“Anyone” by Demi Lovato’ is the epigraph that begins Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Lapvona. Set in the fictional dark-ages country of Lapvona, Lapvona the novel is populated by the terrible sorts of characters Moshfegh fills her stories with. I am ever impressed by her ability to describe some of the worst people you’ve ever met and make them redeemable eccentrics by the end of the book. Perhaps redemption isn’t right, but there’s some sort of satisfaction they manage to achieve over the course of their sinning and selfishness that the reader is invited to share in. You are given the insight to see them through the lens of their own circumstance, rather than how they really are. In a novel of hideous people, no one comes away pretty, all of them playing dress-up in the eyes of an uncaring god.
It is hard to ignore the seasonality of Lapvona. Each of the five sections, the book beginning and ending with Spring, brings a different natural and metaphorical horror for the Lapvonians to experience. There’s the deathly freeze of winter, held against the theoretical second coming of a christ child; the drought of summer, deepened by cannibalization of weaker bodies; spring is a time of new life, only made possible by new death. Each season threatens to make life worse before fulfilling a promise to improve whatever horrors that came before it. A book divided by seasons has been done before and may come across as more than a little obvious without the well polished allegories Lapvona subsides on. Moshfegh is no stranger to obvious passages of time, slowly updating the date in My Year of Rest and Relaxation until reaching September 11th, 2001 by the novel’s end. What may be frustratingly simple at first glance is in Moshfegh’s hands a strong metaphorical backbone that carries her novel through to its conclusion.
The characters in Ottesa Moshfegh’s stories are never people you’d like to meet for a drink. There’s something off-putting about their presence. They may be actively terrible people to those around them, or so disturbingly unnatural that you’d rather have walked into another room every time they cross your vision. What starts as a novel about a deformed boy named Marek loving God in a disturbing way, turns into a character study of his abusive father Jude, Villiam, his cruel uncle and ruler of Lapvona, the corrupt priest, judgemental castle staff, and a kooky witch living out in the woods. When the population of the town has been drawn out in enough detail, the novel switches again into a perverted christ story that ends spectacularly. Moshfegh utilizes every word she has written to bring a sick sort of satisfaction to the end of the book. What little affection there is for her characters is put to the test, which they fail beautifully every time.
Ottessa Moshfegh gets a bad rap for being the gross out, disgust queen of literature. She’s the kid of the BookTok crew who’s unafraid to do or say anything for the sake of looking cool. I don’t think that captures her writing at all, and I’m not even sure I know how to describe what I like about it without leaning into the visceral, gross moments she does so well. I feel like she captures a mood that lives in the collective consciousness, then twists it until it’s no longer quite the same thing, yet is close enough that you still recognize it by the end. I didn’t feel any sort of connection to her main characters, but could see myself as a Lapvonian watching their melodramas play out like a reality TV show. Lapvona does not offer a glimpse at an alternate life, it plays out lives of the types of people you love to hate until you’ve seen so much you begin to hate that you love them.